I worked outside every day for 4 years at least. Weather forecasts are so unreliable I stopped listening. I had better luck trying to figure out if i'd need rain gear in a day by just waking up and looking out the window in the morning than looking up or listening to a weather forecast.
You really start to notice how wrong they are when you spend every day outside. I don't notice any more working inside again. But when you rely on weather forecasts everyday to figure out how miserable you're going to be in a day...you really notice..they might as well just be making things up half the time.
Hmmm. If you are needing down to the minute accurate timing of when rain is going to start & stop, sure nobody can predict that, for every location in the USA, all the time. I have to question where you are getting your weather forecast information??? I am a bachelor degree meteorologist, I dont use any apps that try to be 'hyper local' (omg i hate that word, it is the weather version of AI/ML hype). Just go to the government site www.weather.gov
We can't predict exactly when it will rain, but we can get daily trends pretty good for 3-5 days out. This means you are five days ahead of the weather. You cant know "it will rain from 5:00am to 9:30am on february 4th, 2019". But you can know if we have a synoptic scale system that is moving through your area on that day, and know if there is a probability of rain.
Where do you work everyday outside? i would be happy to give you a 5 - 10 day forecast right now actually and can tell you it will be good. I am supposed to be writing some tests and documentation but i can drop some WX knowledge if you need.
I get the feeling that this "hyper-local" mentality contributed to NYC and surrounding areas being caught flat-footed by the first-of-season snowfall at the end of last year. I have little understanding of meteorology, but it was clear, just from the forecast maps, that a small change in the location and timing of the rain/snow line would make a big difference to the outcome, and that something more than was forecast was a distinct possibility.
As with many things, having a little understanding of the big picture can help you get more out of weather forecasts.
Your last statement is the so true. An amateur forecaster can spend ten minutes looking at the some big picture (synoptic scale) weather and know regional trends (this part of country is dry, these guys are wet, humid etc). This would be a pressure & wind map, showing location of high/lows, maybe some 850mb moisture charts too... But you are painting broad strokes. All of these dumbos on HN want to know exactly when the rain is going to hit your exact location, or you have to be within 3 degrees C modeling the surface temperature of my street so i can either ride my bike or not. We just cant do that with the current science & computational landscape!
After you have the synoptic scale picture, then you zoom in on your target area and get specific if you want to. This local expertise is where you NWS office comes into play. You want the local forecast from these guys!
It's not that, it's selective memory. Everyone remembers the blown forecasts. Even I do. Three or four years back NWS predicted a big Christmas storm in SoCal, but the damn cut-off didn't come on shore, and the resulting offshore flow made the day nice and warm.
And, Americans only: if you forecast temperatures of 99°F and the observed temperature is 97°, good job. But if the observed temperature is 100°, then you made a huge mistake. People need to know when you hit the century mark!
That snowfall last year was bizarre. We all knew it was going to happen - I remember thinking days in advance that I would probably leave work early. So I'm not sure why there was no salt on the roads in the NY area.
I don't work outside any more. But it would be more things like entire weeks of rain or sun forecast and instead would be the opposite all week. I could be sitting in the sun listening to someone on the local radio station using data from the local weather stations telling me it's raining. Or ya know, see it's raining in the forecast and open my door to a blizzard.
Hi brootstrap, since you're a specialist in this field, I'd be interested in your views...
here in the uk, I am often interested in whether or not it will rain in e.g. a 3 hour, 6 hour or 12 hour period. Either because I am going rock climbing, laying concrete, spraying weedkiller, painting outdoors, etc etc. Often this is very important (not just - 'oh, if only I took an umbrella today').
I have a strong impression that the ability of the uk's met office to forecast this is very poor, such that is only just worth consulting their forecasts. OK, sometimes we have settled weather and forecasting is easy (in these cases, looking towards the prevailing wind is also good). But in most cases the weather changes several times a day and the forecasts are poor. This can also be seen by e.g. checking how the forecast for a specific day changes as the day gets nearer - every day you look, it tends to have changed markedly. Also, the uk met office and norwegian met office (significantly better than the uk one, but still not so good) generally disagree with each other.
I really cannot square my 10+ years of 'studying' weather forecasts and the weather with what you are saying (in the case of the uk (pennine hills of northern England)).
And 'stunningly accurate' is just a bad joke.
I presume that precipitation is somehow hard to model, compared to windspeed/pressure/temperature (which seem to be forecast more accurately, though I care about them much less)?
Howdy from across the pond! To be honest, I have almost no experience forecasting for Europe so sadly I cant help too much with the specifics. You are right predicting rainfall at small scale is very hard.
I know that here in the midwest, we never have any days where the forecast at 5am says 'all sunny and zero chance of rain', and then randomly a huge thunderstorm pops up. The atmopshere just doesnt work that way. People get upset about probabilities of rainfall and all that. Just think of the model perspective. The model sees square grid cells that are many KM apart. If the storm shifts from one grid cell to the next one, not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. However if you live in that grid cell, your forecast just changed from getting dumped on to clear skies (or vice versa).
Similar experience in the uk, in terms of whether it will rain or not. 3 hour, 6 hour etc forecasts are of little use - no better than looking out the window. Meanwhile wind speed and temperature seem ok on that timescale, but are (usually) less important to me than precipitation.
It depends a lot on what part of the world you are in - I think that the uk is particularly hard to forecast.
You really start to notice how wrong they are when you spend every day outside. I don't notice any more working inside again. But when you rely on weather forecasts everyday to figure out how miserable you're going to be in a day...you really notice..they might as well just be making things up half the time.